Splash! You are in Costa Rica's Blue Eco Blog. Echoing Eco for Oceans and Waters. Giving voice to dolphins and whales, their waves and their waters, and all denizens of the deep. News they think you should use. Dive in.

Avivando delfines. Dolphin Stoking. How to meet, greet and stoke a dolphin megapod. People and Dolphins come together in the big blue offshore Osa peninsula, Costa RIca. Offshore Osa is the only place where this kind of thing is known and these dolphins need protection from nets and lines and hooks. Right?

Why is it called a dolphin orgy? See in this video from offshore Osa peninsula, Costa RIca. These dolphins need an area free of nets and lines to continue to mix their genes and grow culture. Osa may be the biggest dolphin orgy spot in the world. Let the dolphin festival swim on, no canned tuna, no shrimp, protect dolphin waters from the nets and lines that crash their party every day. Only Offshore Osa

Recent research on Hawaiian spinner
dolphins indicates that they need protected times and places.
Surprise! One bay is visited by as many as sixty swimmers at a time
who try to play with a small group of dolphins. Seems the dolphins
rest in the early daylight hours, and that’s when many swimmer
tourists head out. Less dolphins may come into the bay and the
dolphins might leave earlier than usual when too many people show up.
Spinners in Hawaii rest in small groups near shore in shallow sandy
bays near deep water. Scientists say these places need protection.
Clearly tourists should be told to leave the dolphins alone in the
early daylight hours and fishing and extraction should be stopped in
the bays. Costa Rican dolphins should have it so good.

Costa Rican spinner dolphins deal with
giant nets towed by ships, helicopters dropping bombs, long lines
full of hooks, shrimp trawlers bulldozing the bottom, surprise drill
ships making a big mess, big banging seismic surveys, cargo ships
blitzing by, sport fishers plowing through the pod with lines and
hooks, tourist boats gawking, and even some divers in the water. How
do you think that effects their beauty sleep?

Don't forget here in Costa Rica spinner
dolphins have no protected place at all.

Costa Rican spinner and spotted
dolphins, who also rest in the early daylight, need tourists to leave
them alone at this time. Sport fishing boats need to stop fishing in
the dolphins as they particularly like the early hours of the day.
Many hotel managers want tours to leave early to get everyone out of
the hotel, but this is the wrong strategy if you are concerned about
dolphins. Tourist operators like divers and fishers should put up on
their web pages that they leave the dolphins alone in the am. Guests
of Costa Cetacea over the years will recall that all tours leave late
and respect the dolphins rest time, much to the frustration of some
hotel managers. The interactions here in Costa Rica are much more
interesting in the PM anyway.

Aloha to the Hawaiians for once again
being the world ocean leaders. Lets hope Costa Rica follows.

Communication with Dolphins on video. Listen to
the spinner dolphin super-pod sing human notes. Shawn Larkin is into
his second decade of interacting with this resident spinner dolphin
superpod and as you can see they will swim right over to people who
have been respectful and creative consistently. This offshore open
ocean dolphin pod has been attacked and netted for many decades. This
video shows that a different relationship is possible with the
dolphin super-pods, one that may prove to be much more valuable than
killing them as bycatch for easy tuna fishing.

Stop putting lines in the water before
you argue against people in the water, duh! otherwise you have no
moral high ground. Just obvious greed.

Learning how to interact with the super
pods of dolphins is the best chance on earth to understand alien
society and intelligence, and how we can interface. We need to learn
how to meet and greet all over the worlds oceans. This is crucial
practice for the human race. What if we are the helpless species
trying to beg a more powerful one to stop killing us as bycatch or
for consumption?

Music is a part of the the start to the
crucial dialog. And gear and boats and computers and technology and
people.

Latin America's greatest ocean hero, Laura Chinchilla, granted future
Costa Ricans a much better chance of sustainably utilizing our Oceans
into the future. The sad free for all of too powerful special interests
will now be controlled with vision directed to the people and the
future by a new Vice Minister of Aguas and Mares. Wow! No thats how
you do it! Seems now the voices of all groups of ocean users, not just
the most connected screaming special interests, will have a say. Now is
time for Costa Ricans to speak up about what they know about our
oceans, and help conserve it. Have you heard about the largest dolphin
pod in the world, the spinner dolphins of the Osa peninsula and Cano
Island? Aaaa, happens to be they need a park! They live near to famous
protected areas Corcovado National Park and Cano Island Biological
Reserve, BUT, they live in waters attacked by nets and lines. This Park
or protected area, needs to be south and west of Cano Island to at
least a distance of 30 nautical miles to help these spinners. NOT just 8
miles from the island as some are saying! 8 miles is not enough to
protect the biggest dolphin pod in the world and Golfito and Puerto
Jimenez need to make a lot money in the long run from conserving these
dolphins, not killing them for short term collapsing profits.

Do you dolphin dreamtime? Do it.
Do wild dolphins play with people?
You tell me.
Double Dolphin Dreamtime Dub by shawn larkin and Bigger Blue
recorded at La Milpa Grande, El Guaco,
Dolphins need pelagic parks around the world.
you should help them.
Osa blue water pelagic, Costa Rica.

Sharks’ primal attraction stems from the fear evoked from an
animal so powerful it could eat you, as well as being tasty meat you
want to eat. But once you know sharks, respect and awe trump fear and
hunger, most of the time.

By Shawn Larkin

Many cultures with a maritime
heritage seem surprisingly sympathetic about sharks to landlubbers who
normally only take the time to fear them or eat them.

Those who
come to know the ocean soon love sharks. From ancient Polynesians and
Panamanians to the modern dive tribe, sharks and people get along really
well together. The dive tribe first focused modern conservation
attention on sharks long ago, and we continue to be sharks greatest
champions, as most recently evidenced by reports from Colombia’s Mal
Pelo Biological Reserve by Russian divers (TT, Oct. 14).

Sharks’
primal attraction stems from the fear evoked from an animal so powerful
it could eat you, as well as being tasty meat you want to eat. But once
you know sharks, respect and awe trump fear and hunger, most of the
time.

Over decades of taking people to swim with sharks, I have
seen many self-proclaimed “sharkophobes,” who upon seeing the dreaded
object of their fears in the big blue, jump right in – with their
children. What causes such a sudden shift in attitudes?

Education
came first in the form of a dive briefing on how to get in the water
relatively safely with big sharks. Then came a demonstration. Then
curiosity takes over. Finally, holdouts succumb to peer pressure – or is
it peers uneaten?

The reward seems to be the power to tell
stories that trump nearly all others at dinner that night, as in: “You
caught a big fish? You saw a sloth? You rode a zip line? We swam with
sharks.” Another reward is the wisdom that may come from contemplating
one of the most enduring and diverse evolutionary masterpieces produced
by our blue planet.

Sharks have been around much, much longer than
humans. Their design has been so successful that they have branched
into more than 300 production models ranging from the rare little horn
shark at Cocos Island National Park to the largest fish in the sea –
whale sharks – whose only known birthing waters appear to be near the
Osa Peninsula of the south Pacific coast.

Other famous Costa
Rican sharks include: big schools of scalloped hammerheads; silky
Galapagos; silver-tip sharks of Cocos; the bull sharks of Santa Rosa
National Park, in the northwestern province of Guanacaste, and of the
river mouths of both coasts; the Pacific white tips of most famed
Pacific dive sites; and the nurse sharks of the Caribbean reefs. Cocos
Island is often called Isle of the Sharks or Shark Island.

Ironically,
although decades ago divers at Cocos greatly helped launch the global
changing of perception of sharks from negative to positive, Costa Rica
is now much more famous as an enemy of sharks, as we sell them for
profit garnered from the exotic tastes of wealthy foreigners. Shark fins
for soup can be worth more than double the price of the next
most-valuable Tico seafood: fresh, cold tuna. Since the fins are desired
dried like jerky, fishers need no costly refrigeration or ice, just
space. But this space is at a premium, so all manner of getting rid of
anything but fins is irresistible to the greedy and wasteful.

The
way sharks are fished here is also greedy and wasteful. Long-lines with
lots of hooks left to drift and kill indiscriminately is not
sustainable, and neither is netting congregations of marine life with
giant purse seine nets. Our neighboring countries are already banning
these foolishly unsustainable methods. Costa Rica is appearing to be the
slacker nation in Latin America when it comes to helping conserve
valuable marine life. We should have been the world leader. We could
change that.

The Polynesian Marshall Islands recently parleyed
their culture’s reverence of sharks into sustained economic generation
through marine conservation. This seafaring nation declared all of its
waters a shark refuge and banned foolish fishing. The remote islands
have focused on where the most steady and nationally distributed money
is coming from: divers, sportfishing, artisan fishing, surfers and
ecotourists. The money goes into conserving what makes the money, not
exterminating the sharks with the golden fins. The Marshall Islands is
now home to the biggest real shark sanctuary on planet Earth. You can be
sure countless travel vacations and investments are being planned
accordingly.

The Polynesians and the Panamanians, and many other
ocean nations, see the writing on the water. The only way to conserve
big marine animals is with big marine protected areas and corridors. No
matter how much money is spent on counting, tagging, satellite
transmitting, diving, boating, filming, fuel, foundations, studies,
publications and summits, they will all come to the same conclusion:
make managed protected areas and corridors or your big-money animals
like sharks, which people love so much, will disappear.